A Classical Liberal Blog on Political Science, Economics, Philosophy, Law, and More

In the U.S., states have full authority over local government. Some states strictly centralize power and leave local government little to do. For instance, Hawaii has a single school district for the entire state, so that different localities cannot choose to spend different amounts on the government schools. Michigan effectively has a similar system, because it requires every school district to spend the same amount of money per student and redistributes tax funds across districts to make that possible. Vermont has also centralized school funding.

At the other end of the spectrum, states like New Hampshire let local governments pretty much decide their own level of funding for schools and other programs (about half of all local spending in the U.S. goes toward schools), and towns differ widely. If you want to live in a low-tax, low-spending town or a high-tax, high-spending town, it isn’t terribly difficult to find one. In the middle are states like Texas, where local governments are responsible for their own tax and spending decisions, but the most important level of local government is the county, much larger than the town, and it is therefore difficult to choose where to live based on local taxes and services.

Can we measure how decentralized each state is? I’ve tried to do so. The first measure of decentralization looks at how important local taxes are compared to state taxes. It divides local taxes by state and local taxes put together. This is a familiar variable to scholars of “fiscal federalism,” and it is typically called “tax decentralization.” Here is how the states rank on tax decentralization, as of fiscal year 2011-12, the most recent year for which data on local taxes are available from the U.S. Census Bureau:
New Hampshire 0.62475539
Alaska 0.584999114
Texas 0.555497037
Colorado 0.5420195
New York 0.540915308
Louisiana 0.520062304
South Dakota 0.514664958
Florida 0.508526077
New Jersey 0.503867865
Georgia 0.502739018
Missouri 0.490816162
Nebraska 0.486587041
Rhode Island 0.483462474
Ohio 0.47233672
Virginia 0.468452418
Illinois 0.466955731
Wyoming 0.465238453
South Carolina 0.459566438
Maryland 0.451067476
Pennsylvania 0.449406333
Arizona 0.440699694
Iowa 0.437082825
Oregon 0.434834984
Kansas 0.434319401
Washington 0.431347838
Wisconsin 0.423486277
Tennessee 0.421965652
Utah 0.420621904
Maine 0.411333699
Massachusetts 0.398031363
Connecticut 0.397670719
Montana 0.389680799
California 0.387518844
Nevada 0.383740954
Oklahoma 0.383081024
New Mexico 0.382245601
Alabama 0.382121115
North Carolina 0.366066432
Michigan 0.361458412
Indiana 0.352963108
Kentucky 0.33512693
Idaho 0.325219717
North Dakota 0.312465478
Mississippi 0.306727915
West Virginia 0.29895431
Minnesota 0.282530032
Hawaii 0.258739008
Arkansas 0.220173834
Delaware 0.215201394
Vermont 0.152464302

This isn’t the only way we can measure decentralization, though. After all, some states have more “competing jurisdictions” from which a prospective homeowner can choose than others do. To get at this concept was a little more complicated. I first counted the number of county, municipal, and township governments for each state from the U.S. Census Bureau. Then I looked at what proportion of local taxes came from each level of government and created a weighted average of number of local governments for each state. So if a state had 100 towns, 10 counties, 0 townships, and towns raised 20% of local taxes, while counties raised 80% of local taxes, the formula for the weighted average would be 10*0.8+100*0.2. The formula “rewards” states for letting lower-level, more numerous governments raise more taxes.

Then I thought about the decision of a homeowner in choosing a government to live under. Typically, your general location is set by where you have a job, say, a metropolitan area. But there may be several jurisdictions in that metro area to choose from. So I divided the “effective number of competing jurisdictions” described in the last paragraph by the state’s privately owned land area in square miles and multiplied by 100. So the resulting variable is the effective number of competing jurisdictions per 100 square miles of privately owned land. Higher values mean there is a lot of choice among governments.

Here is how the states come out on this variable measuring choice among governments:

New Jersey is the state where the taxpayer has the most choice of government. While local property taxes are generally high there, that may simply reflect the preferences of local homeowners who want to spend money on services. It would be unsurprising if there are also some local jurisdictions in New Jersey where taxes are especially low.

In general, northeastern states, which are mostly left of center and high-tax, have a heretofore unseen advantage in their fiscal systems, letting competing local governments do much or even most of the taxation, making them responsive to local property owners. Perhaps it is precisely because of that responsiveness that overall tax burdens are allowed to be high in some of these states (New Hampshire aside): homeowner voters are more content with the way government uses their tax money there.

The indicators I use for number of libertarians are as follows: percentage of the vote for Gary Johnson and Ron Paul (write-ins) in the 2012 presidential general election (Ron Paul won a nontrivial number of write-ins in New Hampshire); percentage of the vote for libertarianish gubernatorial candidate Andrew Hemingway in the 2014 Republican primary (he got over 37% of the vote); percentage of the vote for Ron Paul in the 2012 Republican primary; percentage of the vote for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primary; and the percentage of voters registered “undeclared” (independent). These are all measured at the town level.

As in my research on the states, I use principal component analysis to reduce the correlations among these variables to a single “best” variable expressing their underlying commonality. I also “weight” the observations by population, since New Hampshire has many small towns, where sampling error should be higher (lots of zeroes and high percentages in election results). In fact, weighting the observations this way yields better results, as revealed by the eigenvalue of the first extracted component.

These variables do in fact correlate with each other and all contribute positively, as expected, to the extracted component. The highest scoring coefficient goes to 2012 Paul primary vote (0.55) and the lowest to undeclared registration percentage (0.25).

UPDATE: Here are two charts of Andrew Hemingway 2014 percentage against Ron Paul 2012 percentage, by town. The first limits to towns and cities with at least 700 population, the second to towns and cities with at least 10,000 population. As you can see, the correlation is strong.

Most of these are in Grafton County, where I also live. They are all small and rural. The most libertarian large town (over 5000 population) is Plymouth (score of 4.5), a left-leaning college town (also in Grafton Co.). The most libertarian-leaning municipality with a city form of government is Franklin in Merrimack County (score of 2.0). Almost all of the towns where libertarian candidates are most popular are in the west, especially northwest, of the state. Three exceptions are Francestown (5.0), Mason (4.3), Hill (4.0), and New Ipswich (3.9), but even these are west of I-93, which bisects most of the state. The top town east of I-93 is Pittsfield (3.2).

Four out of these 10 are in Rockingham County on the seacoast. Dixville and Hale’s Location are truly tiny. Bedford is a staunchly Republican suburb with a population over 20,000. In fact, many of the least libertarian places are well-to-do suburbs that are strongly establishment-Republican (Bedford, New London, Hooksett, Hampstead, Windham).

Examining the towns that are right in the middle of the spectrum will give us a sense of which places are most “representative” in their libertarian-ness. Here are those, filtering down to places with more than 1000 population:
Derry 0.2
Littleton 0.2
Goffstown 0.1
Keene 0.1
Manchester 0.1
Lee 0.0
Chester 0.0
Claremont -0.0
Sandown -0.2
New Boston -0.2

Some of these are not representative of the state in a left-right sense, however. New Boston, Goffstown, Littleton, and Chester are all firmly Republican, while Keene, Lee, and Claremont are if anything even more firmly Democratic. Derry (R-leaning), Manchester (D-leaning), and Sandown (R-leaning) could be considered somewhat representative of the state.

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A few years ago, I did a statistical analysis of which states had the most libertarians, using data from 2004 and 2008 Libertarian Party vote shares and 2008 Ron Paul vote shares and contributions. David Boaz has prodded me to update these numbers in light of the 2012 election. This post does just that.

To come up with a single, valid indicator of how many libertarians are in each state, I use a technique called principal component analysis (PCA), which extracts the vector of data that best explains the correlations among multiple variables. Say I have a number of different measures of the number of libertarians by state. Using PCA, I can convert those different measures into a single measure. A crude way of doing this would be to simply standardize and average all of the different variables, but that method assumes that each variable is an equally reliable measure of the underlying concept. PCA actually tells us which variables are most reliable measures and weights them more heavily.

To see which states have the most libertarians, I use six measures: Libertarian Party presidential vote share in 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul contributions as a share of personal income in 2007-8, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson contributions as a share of income in 2011-12, and “adjusted” Ron Paul primary vote share in 2008 and 2012. Ron Paul vote shares are adjusted for primary vs. caucus, calendar, number of other candidates, and the like (for details see this post). Hawaii and Wyoming are excluded because they did not collect vote shares in the 2008 presidential primary. D.C. is included.

Here are the results of the PCA on these six variables:
. pca resid12 resid08 lp12 lp08 rpcpi08 libcpi12

“Resid*” is adjusted Ron Paul vote share, “lp*” is LP vote share, and the last two variables are contributions as a share of personal income. What this output tells us is that one single component has lots of explanatory power for the correlations among these six variables: we can interpret this component as the number of libertarians in a state. The method doesn’t give us a number interpretable as an absolute count of libertarians, but a number that we can interpret as representing how many libertarians each state has compared to all the others.

The second table of output shows how each variable contributes to each component. To the first extracted component, the one of interest to us here, the contributions variables actually contribute the most, while adjusted Ron Paul vote shares, especially in 2012, contribute the least. I have found elsewhere that in 2012 Paul did really well in states with lots of liberal voters, as he expanded his base beyond libertarians to antiestablishment liberals and moderates. As a result, his cross-state performance in 2012 isn’t actually a good measure of how libertarian each state is. Still, it contributes a little something to our measure.

Mississippi and West Virginia have the fewest libertarians, while Montana and New Hampshire have the most. Note that Montana and New Mexico will be overstated on this measure, because I have added half of the Montana Constitution Party’s vote share to the Libertarian Party vote share in 2008, because they listed Ron Paul on their general election ballot. No other state had the opportunity to run Ron Paul in the general election, however, so this choice overstates how many libertarian voters are in Montana. But excluding Ron Paul from Montana’s vote share would hurt them because he presumably drew lots of votes away from Bob Barr, the LP candidate, in that state. If I do exclude Ron Paul’s votes entirely from Montana 2008, then New Hampshire ends up just pipping them for most libertarian state. New Mexico is overstated because it is Gary Johnson’s home state, who did very well there both on contributions and on vote share.

These results are quite similar to those I found back in 2010, perhaps unsurprisingly since I included 2008 data on both occasions. Still, there are some small differences. New Hampshire has now easily passed Alaska for the #2 spot. Vermont, Maine, Kentucky, and Texas have gained, while Michigan, Idaho, Indiana, and Georgia have fallen.

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New at e3ne.org, I discuss my conversations with high school students about the moral legitimacy of border restrictions:

We started our discussion with a little bit of improv theatre. I played a foreigner trying to get into the United States without documentation. Students volunteered to play a border guard trying to keep me out. Between us lay an invisible line, the border. I engaged them in a conversation about the moral justification of keeping me out.

To my surprise, the students were more confidently pro-immigration than I was! I played devil’s advocate some and tried to get them to appreciate the nuances of immigration policy.

My view is that borders are morally illegitimate because the state is morally illegitimate. Nevertheless, it can be permissible to use force to stop someone from settling in a particular area when doing so is necessary to safeguard public order or to preserve the minimal conditions for effective political autonomy for the existing communities in that area. For instance, I think it would be permissible for the U.S. government or an American state to prevent a large group of totalitarians from settling on their territory, provided the law does not provide a means for preventing them and their immediate descendants from obtaining citizenship. In a similar way, it would be appropriate for the Israeli government to prevent radical Arab nationalists from settling in their territory en masse. It’s also appropriate to exclude violent criminals, suspected terrorists, invading foreign armies, and, in the context of a welfare state, those unable or unwilling to work.

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How can one group of human beings come to enjoy a right to enforce its authoritative commands on other human beings? In other words, how does government come to enjoy a right to rule, and how do citizens come to incur a duty to obey?

I consider the answer over at e3ne.org. The reasoning depends heavily on Michael Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority, which I have reviewed here at Pileus. As a moral Lockean, my own view is that the U.S. government is illegitimate because it does not have a valid social contract with its citizens. That doesn’t mean the U.S. government is evil, or that we should try to overthrow it, but it does mean that the government doesn’t have any rights that ordinary citizens don’t also have. The U.S. government and its citizens are in a state of nature.

Instead of buying a Starbucks coffee once a week, you could save that money – about $200 over the course of a year – and give it to a charity that saves lives. It’s morally wrong to buy Starbucks coffee when there are people dying around the world. Letting someone die so that you can enjoy Starbucks is like letting a child drown rather than getting your suit muddy.

It doesn’t matter that most other people aren’t living up to their moral obligations. Bystanders’ failure to save a drowning child doesn’t relieve you of a duty to save that child. If you can save a life without sacrificing anything morally significant, you must.

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Recently I finished reading the book Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone. I also assigned part of it to my Ethics & Economics Challenge students. It’s a fun and informative read, draping heavy-duty political science in engaging story-telling. (My post at e3ne.org on the topic is here.)

The book’s central thesis is that the American electoral system is irrational, and that range and approval voting methods provide obviously superior alternatives to the plurality rule for “single-winner” elections. Along the way, Poundstone discusses the Arrow Theorem and why it provides no obstacle to making a comparative judgment among voting rules.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem says that no social choice rule (method for coming up with a social preference ordering over possible alternatives) can satisfy the criteria of non-dictatorship (no one person can make the decision for the whole group, irrespective of the preferences of the rest), universal domain (no preference orderings are simply ruled out of order), Pareto optimality (if everyone prefers X to Y, so should the group), and independence of irrelevant alternatives (changing your relative ranking of X and Z shouldn’t affect your choice between X and Y). In simple language, the Arrow theorem says that there’s no such thing as a “will of the people”: only individuals have preferences.

Poundstone takes issue with that interpretation of the theorem, arguing that the “independence of irrelevant alternatives” criterion should be relaxed or removed. In essence, Poundstone believes that we can make interpersonal comparisons of utility (utility as cardinal, not just ordinal), and that once we do so, we can come up with some social choice rules that are objectively superior to others, because they result in more aggregate human welfare.

The assumption of cardinal, interpersonally comparable utility lies behind the case for range (or score) and approval voting as alternatives to plurality rule. The former methods are said to result in less “Bayesian regret” when used either sincerely or strategically. For instance, plurality voting leads to the “spoiler effect” (Nader causing Gore to lose to Bush) and lots of tactical voting (Nader supporters voting Kerry instead). Sometimes it can even result in victory for a candidate that would lose by a majority to every other candidate, or simply fails to choose the candidate that would beat every other candidate (Poundstone discusses how Stephen Douglas likely would have won a pairwise majority vote in 1860 rather than Abraham Lincoln).

From page 239 in the Poundstone book comes this graphic based on plausible simulations of different elections under various voting rules:

Bayesian regrets under alternative voting rules

Lower scores here are better, and thus you can see that range voting leads to overall least “regret” when voters are sincere. When voters are 100% strategic, range and approval tie (fully strategic range voters simply cast strategic approval-like votes: full marks to their favorite and the preferred candidate of the two with the best chance of winning, none to the rest).

Of course, the whole exercise depends on the notion that you can sum up regrets across voters. In some parts of life, we make rough-and-ready interpersonal comparisons of utility. When we speak of those “less fortunate,” we clearly have in mind the idea that the poor are less happy than the rich. The possibility of empathy seems to require a view that others are “more or less similar” to ourselves, including in their capacity for happiness. At the same time, the possibility of individuality seems to require that we acknowledge that others are “in some ways quite dissimilar” to ourselves. I can’t know what’s best for you, because your happiness has a large idiosyncratic, unmeasurable component.

Where does that leave us? The Bayesian regret calculations, it seems to me, give us good reason to favor range and approval voting over the current system, simply because in the absence of any other numeraire for making cost-benefit calculations of policies, the assumption of interpersonal comparisons of happiness, with everyone capable of the same amount of happiness (no utility monsters), is better than the alternative of throwing up our hands. But we still can’t get away from the fundamental insights drawn from the Arrow theorem: that only individuals have preferences and act on them, and that trying to maximize social welfare at the expense of respect for individuality is not only possibly unjust, but also irrational.

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In ancient Rome, a pileus was a felt cap given to slaves upon receiving their freedom. Since then, this simple cap has been a powerful symbol of liberty.